With two major contracts under its belt, Apple Computer Inc has suddenly broken through into the US defence market. Yesterday the company announced that Honeywell Federal Systems Inc had ordered personal computers from the Macintosh II family under A/UX Unix in support of the Worldwide Military Command and Control System Information System Workstation Segment in a deal worth up to $164m over five years. And last week, the company was given an order by Electronic Data Systems Corp for up to 2,500 Mac IIs valued at about $9.5m, for the National Aeronautics & Space Adminstration’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. NASA’s Macs will replace IBM Displaywriters and MS-DOS boxes from Telex Corp and will link to IBM hosts via 3274s and SNA gateways, and with DEC VAXes over Ethernet. The much bigger WWMCCS contrast -say it Wimmix – requires B1 security in A/UX, and calls for from 10,000 to 80,000 Mac IIs under A/UX. The Macs will be used as secure local workstations for joint strategic operations planning and execution at each level of the unified and specified commands of all US military services worldwide. Applications include office automation, information management, engineering support and computation-intensive missions. The systems will also communicate with existing WWMCCS minis and mainframes. The two orders represent a major breakthrough for Apple into the US defence market, making it clear that the government now regards the Macintosh as a viable long-term alternative to MS-DOS machines as workstations.
